Which was next to impossible when surrounded by literal perfection of the male form.
Thankfully, the ritual ended not too long after, as the candles burned out, and the pressure faded.
Talon breathed deeply. “I can feel you all in a different way now,” he noted, running a hand over his face. “I felt you all through Slade and Emme before, but now it’s a real bond between brothers.”
There was a change inside me too as I absorbed the strong flow of their essences. “You’re powerful together,” I whispered, overwhelmed and emotional in a way that had me fighting back tears.
“We are powerful,” Hunter acknowledged with his satisfied smile. “The sixth was accepted, just as we anticipated.”
That distracted me from my burning eyes. “Wait, what would have happened if Talon wasn’t accepted?”
“Nothing,” Hunter assured me. “The magic would have snuffed out much faster, and we wouldn’t sense him in our quintet essence.”
“He feels like Slade,” Finley said, wiggling his shoulders, as if to work out tense muscles. “But I can also tell them apart. It’s a weird yet interesting dynamic.”
I didn’t have a claiming bite from Slade yet, but to test a theory I stroked along my bond to Talon. When his smoky maple scent spiked, Slade reacted too, the pair of them on either side of me in a heartbeat.
“Naughty, naughty, Emmeline,” Slade murmured, while Talon just released a huff of smoke-laced air. “You shouldn’t play with the bonds like that.”
“They’re definitely connected,” I said breathlessly. “Veryconnected.”
My head spun as they full-bodily pressed against me, especially Slade, who used to avoid prolonged physical contact. There was not a flicker of retreat in his gaze today, and I wasn’t sure if I regretted my actions, or… if I was going to stroke the bond again.
Brats get punished.Yes, please.
“Not the time,” Hunter drawled, eyeballing the three of us like he was figuring out how to smack all of our heads together.
Slade and Talon didn’t release me; my knees were weakening under the dual assault of commanding presences. Before the literal puddle in my panties took me out, Talon’s arms wrapped around me and I was hauled over his shoulder. Like a bag of fucking potatoes.
“Wait!” I snapped, pushing through the clouds of my arousal. “Put me down, you giant asshat.”
That had the dragon pausing, and he lifted me up and away from his body like I was a fucking child. How did anyone hold a grown, not particularly small woman, out like that and show no strain? It wasn’t natural or fair andI was definitely not complaining.
“Asshat?” he queried, tilting his head in that animalistic way of a dragon.
Do my words make more sense when you tilt your head, sexy beast?
Keeping my mental talk to myself for once, I shrugged as best I could in this position. “It’s not a literal observation,” I said, annoyed by the way he continued to hold me up under my armpits. “Now put me down. Where the hell were you even taking me?”
His smile was as slow and dark as the shadows in his eyes. “To my bed.”
Fuck.
“Our bed,” Slade drawled, standing side by side with hisi-fucking-dentical twin.
Double fuck.
“Our world is ending,” Hunter muttered on a ragged sigh. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
Twin rumbles emerged from the dragons, but our entitled alpha didn’t give a fuck. “Enough,” he snapped. “Put our mate down and take a damn walk.”
Hunter stepped closer to me. “And, Emmeline, no more touching the bonds or whatever you’ve now discovered you can do?—”
I stroked his bond.
Whoops.
CHAPTER 4
